1. Field
The invention relates to efficient techniques for exposure assessment of wireless devices.
2. Background
Modern wireless devices such as cellular phones are generally required to meet radio frequency (RF) exposure requirements as mandated by domestic and international standards and regulations. To ensure compliance with the standards, such devices must currently undergo an extensive certification process prior to being shipped to market. The certification process may entail performing a large number (e.g., thousands) of measurements on each device to determine the exposure caused by the device under different operating scenarios. For example, to determine a parameter known as specific absorption rate (SAR), a field scan may be performed over a two-dimensional (2D) surface surrounding the device, and subsequently a three-dimensional (3D) volume scan may be performed at specific points identified on the surface scan that correspond to high SAR.
State-of-the-art wireless devices increasingly support multiple communication technologies (e.g., W-CDMA, LTE, etc.) and/or multiple transmission bands in a single terminal. An exhaustive sweep over all possible operating scenarios to ensure RF exposure compliance would be time-consuming, as 2D and 3D field measurements would need to be performed for each possible combination of active transmitter(s) (TX), active antenna(s), frequency bands, channels, technologies, etc. The excessive time and cost of such measurements would render existing certification processes impractical.
It would be desirable to provide techniques for efficiently assessing compliance of wireless devices with RF exposure requirements to reduce the time and cost of certification.